scattered pictures and double-eared corn

I've been going through some old photographs - don't know why really - as I have many other things I should be doing. I've noticed there are lots of pictures from the beginning of our marriage - then hardly any. This is partly because my camera broke and I couldn't afford to replace it with a camera I liked.

In the past couple of years I've been taking loads of pictures, but they're all digital. I've been trying to make sure I put stuff from trips into photo books (I did our trip to France and Christmas visit to Tennessee) and annual retrospectives - like A Year in the Garden 2006 rather than just leave them in digital files. And I should probably get my blog printed up and bound into a book - just for posterity.

Anyway, it's interesting looking back on our lives. And I've separated the photos into

• Please scan and make into a photo book
  
• Not very good, but can't bear to throw away (the biggest pile)
  
• Throw away (this is the smallest pile)

I've noticed that we were a lot younger and thinner when we first got together. Some of us had more hair. We look quite happy.

I found some old letters, too and managed to avoid the temptation of actually reading them. Many of them are from my grandfather who died almost four years ago and who were planning to name the soon-to-arrive baby after. My grandfather used to send me pictures regularly, too. And clippings from The Tennessean or the Lawrence County Advocate or wherever that he thought might interest me.

For example, I found this snippet of Wilson County News -

The Neal family farm near Tuckers Crossroads is one of just three farms in the state chosen for an important experiment in improving forage for cattle and cutting the farm's dependence on hay for feed, Agriculutral Extension Services Agent Jon Baker said. Baker added that if the proer kinds of grasses are developed for pastures, it will mean less work for the farmers and reduced costs for consumers. As Baker said "Cows are designed to eat forage, not grain." - WARREN DUZAK.

taped to this picture:



On the back of the picture, it's written in my grandfather's scrawl

This is a picture of the water damage in our shop recently. Insurance has pd all damage but $500 which we are asking the roofers to pay.

I do not know if this in Lawrenceburg - where my grandfather rented antique selling space on the square or if it was in Nashville or Franklin - where over time he had also rented space.

I do not know why the story about experimental forage on the Neal family farm was attached to it. That may be an accident of proximity and tape and time.

-0-

I do know why he sent me the snippet on agriculture. We are kin to the Neals. My great grandfather's mother's maiden name was Neal, his given name was Neal and he and his brother Ben were raised in the home of William Haskell Neal, his maternal uncle, after their father died.

Haskell Neal, as he was known, developed Neal's Paymaster Corn (read more if you're interested about his induction to the Wilson County Agricultural Hall of Fame). This was the first reliably double-eared open pollinated corn. Haskell developed it through selective breeding. My grandfather told me that his daddy remembered harvesting corn with his Uncle Haskell and that Haskell kept a special sack for double eared corn - which he would use for seed corn the following year.


Here's what a Works Progress Administration 1939 survey of the State of Tennessee said about it:

Corn always has been the leading crop in value and volume. For more than 50 years the State has had a yearly average of three million acres in corn. In 1935 the crop amounted to more than 60 million bushels. One third of the corn grown is the high-yield variety known as Neal's Paymaster. It is interesting to note that until 1904, when W. H. Neal of Lebanon developed this variety, most Tennessee farmers had been growing the same type of corn planted centuries before by the mound builders. The major part of the Tennessee crop is consumed in the region of its production.

I recently told somone about this, just kind of casually mentioned it - I'm not sure why but it was vaguely relevant. This person seemed distinctly unimpressed. But it was a really big deal. This effectively doubled yields in a time when many people went hungry.

-0-

Events have conspired lately to make me think of Haskell Neal and his Paymaster Corn. I was listening to a radio show about pacifist farming communes in England during World War II and one of the former residents was talking about how they strove to improve yields - and how if they could only produce twice as much corn (this actually probably means wheat) from the same acreage what a difference that would make to the world. I thought of Haskell Neal. He did that.

And last night, I was watching a show about genetic modification and some foodie journalist was absolutely appalled by the selective breeding efforts of livestock farmers to produce some really big beef cattle - Belgian Blues. He seemed to think selective breeding was some kind of new fangled invention, somewhere along the lines of Frankenstein food. How freaking ignorant. How could someone who is supposed to write about food know so little about how food is produced? A biologist on the show pointed out that so long as we have had agriculture we've had selective breeding. I thought about my great-grandfather and Haskell Neal's sack of double-eared seed corn.